Minister Counsellor Vadim Gusev at the Russian Embassy in Minsk on December 22 was summoned to Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

According to MFA, the Belarusian Foreign Ministry made reprehensions to the Russian diplomat over the statements disseminated in news media by the director of the Russian Institite for Strategic Studies Leonid Reshetnikov with regard to Belarus.

The video depicting Reshetnikov who holds the rank of Lieutenant General in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service appeared online on December 20. Reshetnikov said that the Belarusian language was designed not earlier that in 1926 and that Belarus was "a historic part of Great Russia."

The Belarusian MFA stressed that such statements were groundless in substance and categorically unacceptable in form. In the view of MFA, Reshetnikov's words absolutely do not correspond to strategic nature of Belarus-Russia relations. The MFA also stressed that such statements "do not comply with the principles of respect for sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity set out in bilateral and multilateral documents."